


kith and kin

by penhaligon



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-12-07 20:20:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18239735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penhaligon/pseuds/penhaligon
Summary: Claire asks about her uncle. Five gives up, and then he doesn't.





	kith and kin

**Author's Note:**

> You give me siblings and apocalypses, and I can't think about anything else, apparently.
> 
> Content warning: Suicidal ideation.

He's sick.

The thought floats above him, awful and unacceptable, its edges curling and crackling with fire. Five tries to catch it and hold on to it. It's important, he thinks. It's important if he wants to survive.

Does he? a tiny, tiny voice asks. So tiny that even Dolores can't hear it.

 _You need to bring the fever down,_ Dolores says. Her voice is steady. Worried, but calm. Easier to hold on to than his burning thoughts.

He's sick, and it's more than the never-ending cough and phlegm born of ash and acrid air. He's hot, and it's more than the warmth of a noxious atmosphere. His face burns. His eyes feel like jelly, even locked away under his eyelids. His head aches worse than usual, like someone took a nine out of ten on the pain scale and wedged it right up against his frontal bone. God, he needs an aspirin.

 _Aspirin would bring the fever down,_ Dolores says. _But you don't have any left_.

That's right. He's been popping pills like there's no tomorrow, like he's Klaus or something. Because he can't fucking _stand_ the headaches, the way they make his clarity of thought slant ninety degrees to the left. How is he supposed to calculate the way back if he can't _think_? He'd been planning to get more, to raid another pharmacy in town in the hopes that there was something left. But he hadn't because... because...

His thoughts float away again.

When Five comes to in his nest of medical books and water bottles, he feels a little better. It's passing on its own, he thinks, staring up at the tarp that serves as a ceiling. Maybe he can ride it out.

Dolores isn't amused. _You feel better because you slept,_ she says. _You need medicine._

She's right. She always is. Surely he has medicine, though? What's all his scavenging been for, then?

 _Not the right medicine,_ Dolores says, with her infinite, deadpan patience. _The antibiotics._

Of course. Painstakingly building up a hoard of first-aid kits and general pharmaceuticals, and he doesn't have the right antibiotics. Of fucking course.

"Okay," Five says, and he winces at the sound of his own voice: a jagged croak, barely there. He coughs, and it hurts so _bad_.

His breath wheezes out in a sob, and then he thinks: Okay. Antibiotics and aspirin. He can manage that. He knows where the next pharmacy is. He just has to get there. He'd been planning on heading out, but losing focus must have been among his initial symptoms. How long has it been? He doesn't know. He doesn't know, and everything hurts. He can't jump when it hurts this much. He'll have to walk.

 _You can do this, baby,_ Dolores says, and that's how he knows it's bad. She breaks out the soft little names when it's bad.

But it works. He gets up somehow, head spinning and limbs trembling, and he goes.

* * *

Dwelling isn't Allison's style.

At least, she doesn't want it to be. She wants to live her life,  _her_  life, in the moment, no bullshit.

And yet she thinks about things not said, when bedtime stories spun for Claire are pulled more and more from her own imagination than from _Goodnight Moon_ or _Astronaut Annie_. She thinks about how every Umbrella Academy story that Claire asks for is watered down and told in pieces that obscure the whole. It's hard _not_ to think about it, when Allison sanitizes and scrubs the words until the end product is something acceptable to offer.

It _makes_ her think about things, about why she finds certain details too abhorrent to share with a young child.

Allison had been a young child in some of those stories. It makes her skin crawl now, when she remembers that and looks at Claire.

If Five's disappearance had weakened their glass house and Ben's death had shattered it, then Allison's stories force her to sift through the individual shards and peer intently through them with fresh, adult eyes. She rarely likes what she sees.

She tells Claire about the time they'd stopped a shootout at a shopping mall, substituting kinder words to make it seem like a simple fight. What she leaves out entirely is out the part where she'd pulled an almost catatonic Ben into a back room to shield him from the eyes of reporters. He'd broken out of his frozen state under her coaxing, only to break down and cry in her arms and get blood all over her uniform.

She tells Claire about the time they'd foiled a hostage situation, substituting kinder words to make it seem like a simple disagreement. What she leaves out entirely is the part where Luther had found the body of one of the men he'd pulled away from Diego in the heat of the moment, the man's neck snapped so grotesquely that his head was nearly on backwards. Luther hadn't spoken more than a few words for the next several days.

And there's plenty that Allison doesn't even get close to telling Claire about. That she keeps close to her heart instead, gnawing things full of disquiet. She doesn't _want_  to dwell, and yet.

Dad had once told her to tell a man to kill himself, to see if he would. He'd been a bad man who'd hurt people, she'd told herself then. Tells herself now. She'd vomited up everything she'd eaten after that and had not been able to touch food the next day until Mom had cajoled her into it. She still feels sick to her stomach.

She doesn't tell Claire about that, or about the way it had seemed like nothing she'd done, even _that_ , had ever been quite enough. She doesn't tell Claire about using her rumors on her siblings, sometimes when Dad had asked and sometimes when he hadn't, because that's only a slippery slope to dwelling and more dwelling, and she doesn't want it or need it.

She doesn't tell Claire about how growing up had felt like navigating a minefield of expectations, treading oh so carefully in the hopes that maybe her so-called father would spare her a glance. How glances would be given and then taken away in patterns that she could never quite keep up with.

She doesn't breathe a word of it to Claire when she spins her fanciful, halfway fictional tales of heroes, but she promises herself that her daughter will not grow up starving for acknowledgement and fearful of mines.

So when Claire asks for another Umbrella Academy story one night, Allison walks the words as carefully as she'd walked the Academy, and she ends the story with Uncle Five drawing the attention of the bad guys away from her -- their gunfire away from her, she doesn't say, too many enemies to rumor at once, too many for the two of them to physically fight at once, because she and Five had gotten separated from the other four.

The distraction had given her time to regroup and steal a gun, given Ben time to reach them and corral the bad guys with her help. The distraction had also let a few of the men escape, she doesn't add, when Five's powers had given out, exerted to the max. She leaves out the part where Dad had chewed Five out for it, and Five had been steaming with resentment for a week straight.

It had been one of the last missions that all six of them had gone on together, Allison doesn't say, and sometimes, she thinks that Five had been as good at stepping on mines as she'd been at stepping around them.

She doesn't mention any of that as she leaves Claire's eyes wide with her tale of Uncle Five taunting the bad guys into chasing after his dizzying pattern of jumps, of Uncle Ben and his tentacles crashing in to even the odds, of Mommy's voice commanding the rest of the room to _stop._

And once again, Allison finds herself thinking about all of the things not said, the things she's scrubbed her tales clean of, the between-lines and negative spaces of her storytelling.

* * *

Five collapses on the way to the pharmacy more than once. He doesn't actually know how many times. His mind can't seem to keep track of things.

His head still hurts, though the knot of agony has subsided into a dull ache that wraps around his skull like a headband. He's still shaky and hot, and the world keeps tilting. Like the apocalypse had knocked the axis of the Earth even closer to its orbital plane.

His focus narrows to the feel of the wagon handle beneath his fingers, to the count of his breaths beneath the mask, to the sight of his feet moving beneath him. One after the other. Stay upright, stay moving. That's all he has to do.

But he collapses. Then drags himself up. Stay upright, stay moving. Collapse. Repeat.

He's so tired.

Dolores had told him to leave her at the library. Said bringing her along might make it harder for him. Better to travel light and leave enough room for the supplies he brings, plus any he grabs from the pharmacy. But he'd brought her anyway. The silence without her is unbearable, and it's her voice that gets him to the pharmacy, pointing him in the right direction when everything is spinning too much.

Five trusts her implicitly, so it takes him several long moments to comprehend what he finds when he gets there.

Dolores would never lead him astray. He knows that, and yet he stands there dumbly and thinks that she must have sent him on a wrong turn.

"Dolores," he says, and he hates how tiny and weak his voice sounds. "What..."

She doesn't answer right away. Another indication that it's very, very bad. _It's gone,_ she says at last, sorrowful. _I'm sorry._

No. It's not gone. It's not. This is the wrong spot, and the flattened, scorch-black rubble before him is something else.

 _It's gone, sweetheart,_  Dolores says. _We need to try somewhere else._

But Five is so tired. He's so, so tired, and his head hurts so much, and his chest has started to seize in that way it does when he pushes too much. He doesn't even know how long it took to drag himself here. It's light out, as much as it can be in this hell world, but he doesn't remember if it's the same day or the next.

The Earth's axis tilts completely, meeting orbital plane, and Five's head hits the concrete. He wheezes at the impact and the blinding pain like a spike through his brain, and he reaches automatically for something to hold on to. For... nothing. He can't reach Dolores from here, and she can't reach him without any legs.

Tears burn at the corners of his eyes, and he tries to swallow them back. Can't waste water. Can't waste energy. Can't make his head and chest worse. Can't-

... Why does it matter?

His head _hurts_. It always hurts. He's too tired to take another step, and he's beginning to think that his lungs will never recover from the damage they've sustained despite the mask and the medicine he's already tried. He's tired of hurting and trying and having things ripped away.

Might as well just lay here and let the infection kill him.

 _You don't mean that,_ Dolores says, sad and quiet.

Five bites his lip viciously, staring up at the ash-filled sky. He can't bring himself to look at her. "I don't want to do this anymore."

 _You don't mean that,_ Dolores says again, insistent. _You have to get up._

No, Five thinks. He's tired. He's done. He wants to go home _now_ , and if he can't go back...

 _Five,_ Dolores says, a sharpness to it. A tone of voice meant to get his attention.

He tunes her out by focusing on the other sounds around him, on the mournful whistle of hot air through the bones of buildings, hoping that it'll lull him into a sleep that he won't wake up from this time.

At once, he's aware of pages flapping, paper snapping insistently and mockingly at him. Five lets his head fall to the side and fixes a glare on a few astonishingly intact magazines lodged between bits of rubble and the remains of what must have been a magazine stand, only a few feet away.

Of course gossip rags would survive where medication had not. Of fucking course there'd be nothing here except the remnants of something trivial and useless.

Five doesn't have the energy to shift his head again, so he stares at the magazines in a sweltering mix of dull fury and despair. Until one of the covers flaps and straightens out enough for him to catch a glimpse of something that strikes at him, unidentifiable and familiar. Until he focuses on the words that he can make out from here and pulls a name from them.

_Hargreeves._

* * *

"What happened to Uncle Five?" Claire asks from inside her mountain of pillows and blankets and stuffed animals, when the story has tapered off and Allison is lost in thought, in memory.

It pulls Allison out of her memories, and her stomach drops. Something lodges in her throat. She swallows around it, considering her answer carefully as Claire watches her with big, impressionable eyes.

It's a question that Allison has been dreading. That she should have addressed clearly from the beginning. But she hadn't. She'd left it as another gap.

How does she explain to her daughter, her tiny little girl, that sometimes there are no answers? Claire hardly even grasps that Ben is dead. Hardly understands why she hasn't met her uncles and aunt yet. Keeps expecting that one day soon, all of the people from Mommy's stories will walk through the door and be the heroes that Allison has painted them to be.

She could lie and make up another story, about how Uncle Five had to leave and go very far away, how he's very sorry about being so very far, how he might be back one day. She could let the things not said, the negative spaces in her stories grow. Keep it clean and easy for Claire, for herself.

But the words turn to ash in her mouth, sour and wrong. It feels... nauseating.

Whether Five had left on purpose or not had been the topic of a morbid debate or two, most notably the time they'd stolen some whiskey during a rare occasion when Dad had been away and absolutely nobody had any fun. But if something had  _happened_ to him...

"... I don't know," Allison says instead. The words tumble out, troubled.

Claire does not look heartened at the revelation that her mother is not the source of all knowledge in the universe, so Allison pushes some blankets and pillows aside to make room and pulls her daughter closer.

"We never figured out what happened to him," Allison continues, rubbing a hand over Claire's shoulder. She says nothing about the fact that Dad had never even _tried_ , as far as any of them knew, and she hesitates. Is this the right thing to tell a child? She doesn't know. But neither does she know what else to say, even though words have always been her domain. She isn't used to this, this uncertainty of phrase, this faltering and doubting herself in the thing she's been master of for a long time. It's almost frightening. "I'm sorry I don't have a better answer for you."

Claire's bottom lip wobbles. "Is he okay?"

It breaks a little something in Allison, that she hadn't thought possible to break. That she'd thought she was past, done feeling. For a moment, all she wants is to tell Five that there's a little girl who's worried about him.

_I heard a rumor that you came back, you stupid asshole._

She swallows again, around the lump in her throat. "I hope so, baby." And because Claire's eyes are so big and sad, Allison tightens her embrace and adds, "Uncle Five was tough."

She manages to smile to herself, despite herself. Tough, meaning a contrary, know-it-all pain in the ass. He'd perfected the art of blinking away the second he heard a suspicious syllable or intake of breath, and she'd learned to appreciate it. Sometimes she'd even appreciated how he could dish out rejoinders as well as she could. When they weren't being overly nasty and personal with it, anyway.

"Wherever he went, I'm sure he did alright," Allison says, squeezing Claire's shoulder.

Claire considers this, then nods. Her eyes are still watery.

"Can you be tough like that?" Allison asks, lifting a finger to tap at Claire's nose. Privately, she hopes _not_ in the way she'd actually meant. Claire is contrary enough as it is.

Something in Claire's face brightens, just a bit. There's nothing she likes better than trying to live up to the heroes in Mommy's stories, and Allison does her best not to feel guilty about it. Her best, as of late, has been lacking.

"I wanna jump!" Claire says on the heels of a rapid nod.

Allison chuckles. For the past month, Claire has wanted to throw knives and has been substituting with pillows and toys instead. The utensil drawers have been thoroughly child-proofed, just in case.

"Maybe not that," Allison says, holding her daughter tight, and even as she laughs, her insides twist uneasily with it. It often feels like she's holding her breath, waiting to see if Claire ever develops any powers of her own. "But sometimes sad things happen that we don't have answers for, like Uncle Five going away, and that's when we need to be tough. Okay, sweetie?"

She doesn't know if it's the right thing to say. If it's what Claire needs to hear right now, if she can really understand. But it's the only thing that Allison  _can_ say. She can't rumor the situation better, and she can't bring herself to lie about it. She doesn't know why the idea sits so wrong with her all of a sudden. But the gaps in her stories are maddening tonight. Maddening and sterile in the way that a hospital is, with the lurking feeling of malady and wrongness just around the corner.

Claire nods again, slowly and solemnly this time. "Okay." She seems to be thinking hard, then: "I want a story about Uncle Five!"

Allison sighs. Her throat is already dry and tired from the others she's told tonight, from the unusual experience of having words come to her halting and inadequate, from an uneasy resurrected sorrow that she hadn't thought could linger so long. She doesn't want to keep wrangling with negative space.

She considers putting her foot down, even though she knows that Claire will fight it, and it will turn into a whole exhausting thing. Again. But because she'd considered lying and layering reality with something saccharine, when an instinct deep down in her gut tells her that something very bad happened after all, Allison gives in and tells another story that is, for the most part, true.

To remember him, she tells Claire, and Claire agrees, and it feels a little better than filling the gaps with things not said.

* * *

Allison's name is on the cover of the magazine. Her name is on the cover, and there's a picture of a man and a little girl, and Five stares and stares and stares.

His fingers are pulled magnetically towards the magazine and come up short. Despair congeals instantly, heavy and numb, and he takes a shaky breath. The thought of actually getting up is too much, but slowly, slowly, he's able to drag himself over just enough to yank the magazine with Allison's name from what's left of the stand. A heady rush of victory only leaves him more dizzy, and he flops over onto his back, breathing slowly and deliberately, trying to focus.

Finally, Five lifts the magazine above his head. His fingers reach up, shaking as they run over the once-glossy finish, over the words there that speak of some scandal that he can't focus on.

He can only see Allison's name. He can only see the girl, small and smiling.

The girl looks familiar, in a distant way. Like hearing someone described in great detail and then seeing their face. It hasn't been so long for him since he'd seen Allison at that age, and he can see glimpses of her in the girl on the cover. It had been much longer for Allison. Long enough for her to get away from the Academy. Long enough for her to find someone to marry.

Long enough to have a _daughter_.

Five's heart thumps against his ribcage like it's trying to get out. The hot air crowds down his throat, and he starts coughing again. It's bad enough that he forces himself to roll over onto his side and pull his mask off, out of fear that he'll hurl up whatever's left in his stomach, but he doesn't. Finally, it subsides, and he clutches the magazine tightly, trying to regain control of his trembling limbs, of his thoughts.

Allison had a daughter. Allison is _dead_ , he thinks, choking again, and he draws in a shuddering, sobbing breath. Her daughter is dead, if the complete radio silence from every corner of the Earth is any indication.

Five takes another heaving breath, steadying his lungs, and flips through the magazine with fingers that won't stop trembling. The article is easily found, more pictures jumping out at him, and this time, Five is ready for his chest to seize at the sight of a grown-up Allison.

It's as bad as seeing Vanya on the back of her book, the swooping feeling inside his stomach of missing a step and falling into a future where his sisters, his siblings had grown up without him. He closes his eyes before he reads any further and takes a moment to affix the new image of adult Allison over the only other one he has.

It's a paparazzi photo, but it's better than a corpse.

He'd known from Vanya's book that Allison had gone on to become an actress, but the rest of this must have happened after the book was published. He drinks in every detail that he can, adding to the construct of his sister in his head. It's all he has -- the distant-recent past, and a book, and now a trashy magazine.

True to ambitious form, Allison had gotten out and done something with her life, with all of the glamour that she could have ever wanted. With a family of her own to boot. That must have stuck in Dad's teeth. Five is almost proud, almost happy for her, but for the fact that it had ground to a screeching halt in more ways than one.

There's plenty of speculation and no outright reason given for the divorce, but Five knows -- knew -- his sister and can read between the lines and see into what isn't being said. Full custody granted to her husband, who'd sought divorce in the first place, might as well be a neon sign.

Oh, Allison.

Makes sense, Five thinks, feeling a strange sort of solidarity with his sister as he lies there in ruin and sweat and pain. Solidarity that had been less common when he'd still been around, when they'd been full of barbs and competition for the sake of attention and ambition.

But solidarity that had slipped through anyway, in moments when they'd been the only two able to keep up a verbal back and forth that had been more fun than fiery, especially when directed at too-easy lower-hanging sibling fruit. When his phasing and Allison's charm had been used in flawless collusion to clear the way for late night donut or bowling excursions.

When he'd gotten good at dodging Allison's rumors and spent a while thinking that she hated him for it, until she'd admitted that she liked how it made her think of cleverer ways to get ahead.

Makes sense, Five thinks again, hazy. Maybe they're just doomed to be consumed by their powers in the end, even if none of them so literally as Ben. Five had gotten stuck in this nightmare. Allison had lost the life she'd built. And if the date of publication is any indication, there'd been precious little time to fix that.

Five's eyes find the girl's name again, staring at the little printed word like it's the only thing left on the face of a barren planet. Claire.

His _niece_. Claire.

There are other pictures in the article, and he stares and stares at them too, trying to imagine what she'd been like. Smart, or creative, or spirited? Rule follower, or troublemaker? Had she taken after Allison? Had she taken after any of the rest of them? What had her father been like?

Five doesn't know. He doesn't know, and the article is more concerned with the scandal of it all.

She'd been a little girl, he thinks, his throat clogged with illness, with ashy phlegm, with heartache. Just a little girl when something had scorched the Earth so badly that radio waves bounce back empty-handed again and again.

The glossy paper crinkles and bends.

No, no, _no_.

Get up, Number Five.

He draws in a deep, painful breath and pushes himself up on his elbow. The world spins around him, but he cradles the magazine close to his chest and rights himself, even though his mind is heavy and foggy, and his body screams at him to stop. "Dolores," he rasps, pausing when he's on his knees and watching what's left of nearby buildings swim hazily in his sight, "where's the next pharmacy?"

 _Two streets over,_ Dolores answers, her voice warm with pride.

Well, thank goodness for corporate competition, at least. He can manage two streets. There will be something there to treat the infection raging within him. And he can manage the trip back to the library after that. That's it. That's all he has to do for now.

And he has to do it, because fuck this. Fuck this apocalypse, and fuck the entirety of space-time too. He only has to figure out the right variables, and then he's going back. He's going back, and he's putting a stop to this, whatever it takes. His siblings are not going to meet their end in rubble and ruin. His niece, _Claire_ , is going to get the chance to grow up in a living world.

He's going to meet her. He's going to breathe clean air again.

He just has to get there.

With pain clutching his head as tightly as he clutches the magazine, Five staggers to his feet, readjusts his mask, and goes.


End file.
